Drawing on Memory

Drawing on Memory, is a consistent and thoughtful book of poetry drawn from Tom Conaty’s unique investigative skills into the meaning of life. - Noel Monahan
In Drawing on Memory, Tom Conaty considers how we are shaped, coloured and haunted by experience. The voice is clear and intimate. His attention is unfailing. Boundaries are fuzzy and strangeness is always close. The dead come back to life, animals assume control, relationships bloom and fade, lines are redrawn on maps, words take on new meaning, names almost forgotten. The border between the real and the imagined blurs. This is a collection that deals with the consequences of the past, and takes glorious pleasure in the tiny moments that we can’t shake off. - Chris Binchy
Tom Conaty’s poems are rich, controlled and very beautiful. The poet probes cartographies of a sacred land, and the position of humans in such ancient places. Certain poems – earthy, instinctual – show the poet drawing on word-hoards of memory, setting them ablaze in a fluid past or present, bringing to our attention a soothsayer, a man stripping off in the river Dodder, a suicide. He also writes of love – absent, abused, and passionate. The subject of the powerful poem Breaking the Bread of Life – A Communion Sequence, is clerical crime and child abuse, the tone understated but accusatory. The phenomenal world of crow, magpie and corncrake, is particular and vivid while the tremulous capacity of Border Fox reminds the reader of ungodly political terror in other times. Like so many poems in this luminous collection, it brims with grace, grit, and subtle vision. Tom Conaty’s poetry is simply revelatory and I loved this collection. - Mary O’Donnell